[Fluxus] GLFW?

[Kassen]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 01:27:50AM -0400, Dan Wilcox wrote:
>    Howdy all,
>    Apologies if this has come up before, but is there any interest in
>    upgrading fluxus from GLUT to GLFW?
>    GLFW version 3 has multi-window, multi-context, & openGL ES support not to
>    mention copy to/from system clipboard (great for the scratchpad). The GL
>    ES support means Fluxus could run on the Raspberry Pi natively without X
>    which would be quite cool. I did check and racket is available as a
>    Raspbian (RPI+Debian) package.

A quick search informed me that it supports joysticks too; there would
be some real value in that especially if that would be cross-platform.
Cross-platform joystick support can be a issue as our friends in the
SuperCollider world saw. If it can run without X on a Pie it might
also be able to on a desktop/laptop; that might make sense to cut down
complexity in installations where we may not need a desktop
environment/windowing system/etc at all and those just create
complexity; I know I am not the only one who sometimes sets up
computers wit a .xsession that merely loads Fluxus in full-screen; it
seems rather wasteful to have a whole X stack in that case.

On the downside; it depends on OpenGL3.0 and up, which I just read was
released in 2008, only 5 years ago. I am personally in favour of
re-using old computers. This -to me- makes sense both from a
environmental point of view and from the perspective of enabling low
budget artists to create works without the need to ask for support or
approval. Hardware from 5 years ago is quite capable of doing
interesting things.

Being able to get to the clip-board is not such a big issue to me;
there are utilities for that that a Racket or C++ call to the system
should be able to reach. I am not sure why we didn't yet integrate
that with Ctrl+c/v (or Command + c/v, as the case might be) yet; it
should be fairly straightforward.

I don't know enough about it to voice a opinion either way but these
are the concerns that stand out to me most right now.

Yours,
Kas.